


Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

by GretchenSinister



Category: Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Gen, New Year's Eve
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 09:43:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,112
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19903690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GretchenSinister/pseuds/GretchenSinister
Summary: Original Prompt: "Its new years eve(or new years, depending on where you live) so i want a fic where jack flies jamie(any age) to new york and they watch the countdown from the top of a building. If you have a young!jamie, make it a fluffy friendship fic. If its older!jamie, they have their first new years kiss with each other."Note: I’m tagging this as Bennefrost but this fic is not really shippy, it’s just that it focuses on Jack and Jamie interacting and I feel this makes the tag relevant. I went with the option of young Jamie being the one to go to New York, but college-age Jamie is looking back on that visit. Not 100% fluff in the way I think the prompter intended.





	Should Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr on 5/28/2016.

“Have you ever been to Times Square for New Year’s?”  
  
Jamie didn’t know the person asking. She was another guest at the post-finals house party, a friend of a friend. He thought she looked vaguely familiar, but if that was because he actually had met her or if he had just seen her around the small campus, he couldn’t say.  
  
She was the closest person to a total stranger that Jamie had interacted with in weeks, and that might have been what led him to answer, “Yeah, I have.”  
  
“What was it like?” she asked immediately. “I’ve always wanted to go, and I think I might be able to this year. Did you have to get there really early?”  
  
Jamie dove into his drink, stalling for time. Of course she would ask those things, and of course he wouldn’t be able to answer them. These kinds of questions were why he had always kept his trip to see the New Year’s Eve celebrations in New York a secret. Those questions didn’t have anything to do with what he had experienced.  
  
What was it like?  
  
It was the last day of 2013. He was young enough that when he started nodding off at his family’s get-together at around 10, no one questioned it, and he was sent up to bed on his own. Jamie remembered being amazed that his acting had been good enough for that, because he hadn’t been tired at all. A few days ago, in the letdown after Christmas, Jack had visited, and told Jamie to look for him on New Year’s Eve.  
  
Jack hadn’t been very specific about the time. As soon as Jamie was out of sight and out of earshot of the party below, he ran the rest of the way up to his room. He pushed the chair from his desk up against the windowsill, and settled down to wait, looking intently up at the clear, starry sky.  
  
Ages, or maybe minutes, later, Jack did his best impression of a shooting star across the sky, and Jamie opened his window as quickly as he could, fumbling once or twice. He knew he didn’t really need to open the window, but he wanted Jack to know how much he wanted him there.  
  
“Hi,” Jack said, as soon as the freezing air was flowing into Jamie’s room. “Do you want to go to New York?”  
  
Did he? He wanted to spend time with Jack, and he wanted to fly. “Yes!” he said. He was always saying yes around Jack, and a lot of times the things he said yes to were the kind that weren’t the best ideas, the kind of things that would have ended in disaster if Jack hadn’t been around.  
  
“Great!” Jack jumped into the room. He crouched down in front of Jamie. “Get on my back!”  
  
Jamie remembered to grab his coat this time—Jack never did.  
  
And then! And then! They soared through the freezing air, not high, but fast, very fast. The towns below passed in sparkling blurs, and overhead the sky opened up with stars stretching out forever, so many stars, stars bright in a way that Jamie hadn’t realized they were, and maybe they weren’t, they just looked that way while he was holding on to Jack. The stars seemed to cascade around them, even as they neared New York City with its movie-familiar skyline.  
  
Jamie gasped as they entered the canyons of skyscrapers—people wouldn’t see Jack, but they could see him, couldn’t they? (Later, Jamie had looked for mentions of a flying boy on the paranormal message boards he secretly frequented. He had found nothing, and after being reassured, he became much more uneasy than he had ever been—if he could be missed while he was unable to hide, what else could be?) Jack only laughed and spread his arms as they flew ever closer to the heart of light and noise that was Times Square.  
  
They were in time. The ball still waited above the crowds packing the square. Jack found them a roof to perch on, and didn’t tease Jamie for never fully letting go of him. It didn’t seem to occur to him that he could ask the wind to calm down around them so Jamie wouldn’t feel the need to constantly hang on, but that was just Jack.  
  
And it was amazing, amazing, looking down at all the people, hearing the music, seeing the countdown steadily tick away. Minutes to the New Year, and Jamie was freezing, and Jack was smiling so widely, and who else had ever done this?  
  
Jamie knew he was the first. He shivered, and not just from cold.  
  
“Look!” Jack cried, hugging Jamie against his side. “Look!”  
  
The ball reminded Jamie of the Christmas ornament he was pretty sure North had given his family, shimmering with sparkling lights as it slowly fell towards its resting place in the new year. As it landed, he decided he liked the ornament better. As it landed, Jack hugged him tighter, and Jamie hugged him back, tightly enough that he could feel Jack’s cold through his coat. Jack kissed the top of his head with the feeling of a large snowflake falling on his hair, and lifted him up and spun him around in the air. And Jamie wasn’t afraid at all, though later he wondered if he should have been, hundreds of feet above the ground with only Jack’s hands to hang on to.  
  
Their flight back was slower, with more detours towards fireworks, towards bonfires, towards anything Jack found interesting. Jamie had never realized that so much happened on New Year’s Eve, so much that only after he started falling asleep on Jack’s back did Jack even realize that he ought to bring Jamie home. It seemed to take a lot of effort for him to focus on going to one ordinary home with everyone there asleep, but he managed, and Jamie was more grateful than he could say, more grateful than he thought he should say. How could he want to sleep in his own bed when Jack was there? But Jack didn’t seem to mind, he said he knew he couldn’t keep Jamie away from Sandy forever, and so Jamie didn’t have to explain himself.  
  
And that’s what it had been like. Something utterly amazing, utterly impossible, something so magical it was terrifying.  
  
He couldn’t talk about the smallest part of it, not when he hadn’t seen Jack in so many years, not when he wasn’t sure if he wanted Jack to come back now.  
  
“I was really little,” he answered. “I don’t really remember any of it.” 


End file.
